New in Paperback: ‘King Zeno,’ ‘The Monk of Mokha’

KING ZENO, by Nathaniel Rich. (Picador, $19.) In 1918 New Orleans, a new style of music takes hold as the Spanish flu, the mafia and a serial killer ravage the city. Rich’s sprawling, unruly novel focuses on three characters — a Creole jazz musician, a detective recovering from World War I and the matriarch of an organized-crime family — whose lives are tossed into chaos by an ax-wielding killer on the loose.

THE MONK OF MOKHA, by Dave Eggers. (Knopf, $16.95.) Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the Yemeni-American at the center of Eggers’s book, became captivated by the history of coffee in his family’s country and set out to encourage farmers there to revive the trade. Eggers tells his story, though the book is built less on a history of Yemen or coffee than on a more familiar theme: the American dream.

THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $16.) At the opening of this debut novel, Jim Byrd is waking up after a heart attack, which left him dead for several minutes. But the world he finds after his revival seems strange and impossible (free-range holograms, disease-detecting condoms). As he encounters more and more supernatural elements, the sense that life is off-kilter nags at him, and at us.

FUTUREFACE:A FAMILY MYSTERY, AN EPIC QUEST, AND THE SECRET TO BELONGING, by Alex Wagner. (One World, $18.) The only child of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Wagner grew up hearing stories of “escapes, settlement, assimilation.” She set out to understand her heritage, traveling across the world and turning to DNA tests. Our reviewer, Maud Newton, praised the book, writing, “It’s the concreteness of Wagner’s own search, in all its messy detail and lingering uncertainties, that underscores our interconnectedness.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY:A BIOGRAPHY, by Mary V. Dearborn. (Vintage, $18.) The first female biographer of Hemingway, Dearborn writes that she is immune to her subject’s hypermasculine mythology and legacy, and turns to what formed the writer. Her account is particularly strong on Hemingway’s tortured relationship with his mother, his fractious marriages and what could be seen as his fluid understanding of gender.

SPOONBENDERS, by Daryl Gregory. (Vintage, $16.95.) The Telemachus family, blessed with telekinesis, mind-reading and other psychic powers, was once a television sensation. But when a death derails the act, the remaining members confront the burdens of their gifts and struggle to lead offstage lives. As our reviewer, Manuel Gonzales, put it, “What Gregory accomplishes in his seventh novel is both magic and magic trick.”